When I first discovered masturbation around the age of 10, I thought it must be a big secret. I knew, of course, that boys my age “jerked off” — they bragged about it at school, and I’d seen American Pie. But I’d never heard about how to masturbate or girls ever masturbating, and this lack of information made me uneasy. I became curious about my female classmates (did they know about this miraculous pastime?) and suspicious of the adult women in my life (they had to know, so why hadn’t they bothered to tell me?). My limited sex education hadn’t touched upon masturbation at all, so I was left to imagine either that I was the first girl ever to discover it, which seemed improbable, or that everyone else understood it to be so depraved, so wrong, so icky that they would never dare speak of it.

This realization certainly didn’t stop me, but it added a new layer to the message I was already receiving from the romance novels I read — well, from the specific sections of romance novels that I read over, and over, and over again: Sexual pleasure was not something for me to know, on my own. It was something for a man to bring out of me — to awaken within me, if you will — preferably in a scene involving a roaring fire, or a secluded beach, or some kind of Renaissance-era clothing. In short, I was expected to wait for a man to introduce me to my own sexuality.

Just recently, certain TV shows have started to acknowledge female masturbation. Kenna, played by Caitlin Stasey, masturbates briefly on a 2013 episode of CBS’s Reign, and Tina Belcher’s fantastic, if animated, sexual imagination is one of the best parts of FOX’s Bob’s Burgers. But the shock and outrage from audiences — which, in the case of Reign, resulted in most of the scene being cut from the episode — proves this kind of representation is far from normalized.

So why are we still so weirded out by the idea of a girl or woman masturbating?

It goes back to outdated ideas about the way sex is “supposed” to happen — the way I read about it in my romance novels as a preteen, and the way most of us have grown up watching it happen in romantic comedies and on TV. A man seduces a woman. The woman resists at first; she doesn’t want the man to think she is that kind of girl. Finally, she gives in, and discovers that she might even enjoy sex a little bit! As Daniel Bergner ​demonstrated in his 2013 book ​What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire​, the idea that women should be sexually passive is not based in biological science. Yet we still haven't accepted that women — all women — are into sexual pleasure. When we are taught that ​this certain type of sexual interaction is the height of romance, it’s easy to start believing our own lives should emulate it. ​

Not only is that really unfair to everyone involved, it’s also dangerous. First of all, what even is “that kind of girl”? When we buy into the idea that women should be dependent upon men for sexual pleasure, it’s easy to “slut” shame each other for not playing by that rule. And what about the idea that women need to be persuaded to have sex? When we believe that women should act coy and naïve, boys might grow up calling sexual assault “persistence,” and girls might question whether they have the right to say and to mean “no.” When we deny women full sexual agency, we encourage a system that ignores and even condones sexual violence. We ​need to assert control over our own bodies, and getting comfortable with the idea of female masturbation is a step in that direction.

This doesn’t mean we ​all have to start sharing details about our own masturbation experiences. But it’s time to acknowledge that it happens (often), that it’s delightful, and that for many women, it’s essential to sexual pleasure. Masturbation can serve as a kind of practice run for sex with a partner — we get to figure out what feels good for us and what we are comfortable with, so we don’t spend our lives having bad sex that we can’t even communicate about.

But it’s also important to masturbate for its own sake, too — to let ourselves be the glorious, messy, authentic ​kind of​ person that isn’t dependent upon anyone else’s validation.

The more we write about female masturbation and the more we see it normalized alongside other types of sexual activity in the media, the closer we’ll get to sexual equality for women. It will be a long time coming.